One of the interesting oddities of the middle Montaigne essays is that he starts toying around with the idea that there are personal forces that can alter our natural states. He is strongly against all forms of divination, but is open to the idea that our souls have an internal wisdom to them that can guide us. He equates the soul with the will very often, and gives many examples of how it can overcome pain and perform heroic feats.
And here, he has another idea to try on about the human soul — that we can make ourselves sick simply by putting it in our minds that we are not well. But he doesn’t have just psychosomatic states in mind, he draws on examples of people becoming blind after pretending to be so. He believes in the power of imagination.
I have used this space to examine issues of mental health and how we speak of mental states can become self fulfilling prophesies. If you engage in self talk about your mental state and call yourself depressed, you are very likely to become depressed. ‘I am’ statements are extremely powerful, both positive and negative, and when these words turn into belief, they can be self fulfilling prophesies.
Having said this, I am often at a loss to explain why my body follows certain cycles and why I have an intuition at times that something is off. I am most prone to low energy states early in the winter. I do not know if I have seasonal affected disorder—there is some recent research that the phenomenon might not be a clinical condition—but it certainly feels that way. In recent years, I have traveled for work events in California or Florida in January and perhaps that has prevented me from feeling these states. This year our event has been pushed back to February and I am feeling an awful slog.
This week, I know that something is off, but I can’t quite tell if I’m coming down with an illness or if it’s a mental state. So I keep questioning myself—is something off with my diet or sleep patterns? Is anything external bothering me? Is it just the cold weather getting me down? I haven’t come up with a definitive answer, I just now that my mind is a muddle and it takes every ounce of will just to get through each day.
These states usually pass by mid February for me, then I begin the short climb to my anxiety season, which hits me most years sometime in April. I am almost always extremely agitated this time of year. I haven’t quite pinpointed why it happens, and the agitation seems weaker in recent years, but I still sense that the spring is the time of year when everything gets shaken up for me.
What tends to help me overcome difficult periods is to just keep going—maintain my workout schedules, keep writing, make my deadlines at work, make sure my children are well fed and get off safely to school. That sounds downright stoic, and I’m a little disturbed by that.
But I’ll give the old Romans and Greeks this much: they had an appreciation for the wisdom that time tends to heal wounds, that if we keep the focus on the things within our control, we will usually recover. It’s healthy to recognize when something is off, but it’s not a good practice to spend too much time figuring it all out.
A little Pyrrhonism to add, perhaps. Accept the disruption, but also accept its mystery. Note it, adapt as necessary, and keep going.
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